The Speaking Cloth

by Jane Monson©

As she hid her mouth behind her hand, she recalled the woman with the scarf. Someone close to her, who shared her house and once her bed, had told her she was ugly; that her borrowed teeth unsettled conversations, that her mouth was without scaffolding, her face inarticulate, her skin the paper of creased up thoughts. So, one day, as the sun rose and bled between the curtains in a clean gash of light, she took a floral cotton scarf and wound it around her neck and over her mouth. At the sound of his leaving, she appeared and spoke through the scarf, the front of the material puffing in and out according to the thoughts she’d had that day. As her throat fills with the wind and the flowers, she hears the sun, ticking carefully over her head.

Prose Poem from Speaking Without Tongues (Cinnamon Press: Oct 2010)

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